Recently, I had one of my most remarkable experiences in the concert hall ever. In the middle of this summer’s Lucerne Festival, this was a performance that I was initially only “curious” to hear, bringing no real expectations with me. The program consisted of the complete Spiegel by Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha, being given its belated Swiss premiere as a full 90-minute cycle, performed by the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra with Matthias Pintscher on the podium.

As my friend visiting that day remarked, “This music is so human. Despite everything going on, it’s incredible that we can still do things like this.” The Spiegel Cycle, understandably a rarity to encounter live — and that’s the only real way to encounter it, especially in such a committed performance from these enormously talented young musicians — is a landmark of 20th-century “originality,” often tagged as an instance of the Klangflächenkomposition movement, in which the actual sonorities produced by an orchestra provide the center of interest (think Ligeti and Xenakis).

But unlike, say, Ligeti, who can sound more “otherworldly” in comparison, Cerha’s unprecedented experiments in this direction seem to implicitly evoke more “accessible” dramatic impulses without losing anything of their audacity and originality.

In a talk beforehand, the 91-yer-old Cerha, who still composes, spoke of a twofold connotation in his choice of the title Spiegel. One is architectural: the overall design is an arch form, with movements mirroring one another around the central Spiegel IV: III and V share certain characteristics, as do II and VI and I and VII, a summarizing movement that also mirrors what has gone before. And there are internal cross-references within the individual movements.

The second connotation Cerha mentioned is autobiographical, though he says he didn’t come to realize this until the 1980s, long after he began the project in 1960 and assumed what he was writing was so outrageous it would never actually be performed. Spiegel can be seen as a reflection of and coming to terms with his traumatizing experiences in the Second World War, when he was drafted as a teenager and deserted. But like any great work of art, the ultimate reflection will be of the experience the listener brings to it.

The concept of composing without motifs, themes, counterpoint, rhythmic phrases — all the traditional “thinking” processes of Western music — is incredibly liberating, but also frightening. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of Baroque Affekt in terms of the mood that dominates a movement. But the emotional complexity elicited is of a high order.

Cerha even foregoes the instinct to use the orchestra in terms of its choirs. All of the voices of his enormous orchestral apparatus are autonomous, though they do gather and unite to thrilling effect. Pintscher conducted with his hands and inspired the young players to new heights. Each Spiegel called for a separate score, which he ritually put to the side when done, pulling out the next one. His control of the massive crescendos that gradually detonate was remarkable, Pintscher practically flying with wing-like arms).

The climax to end all climaxes that arrives in Spiegel VII brings with it something beyond catharsis: a power of expression that sees hope beyond the devastation in the very fact that it can be articulated by such art.

To open its Special Event Day on Sunday 27 August, Lucerne Festival presented the Swiss premiere of Sila: The Breath of the World by John Luther Adams. I’m not able to post video of that (the video above is from the Lincoln Center premiere three years ago at Hearst Plaza), but I can report that the “JLA effect” was in full sway: the audience, some there by design, some caught by surprise and curiosity, fell under the spell of this aural mystery unfolding for nearly an hour at the Europaplatz, just between the sleek, modernist KKL concert complex and Lake Lucerne.

And today I just learned that the wonderful music writer and critic Bernd Feuchtner devised a program for the first-ever German performance of Become Ocean last year at the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, pairing JLA with Alberto Ginastera’s Popol Vuh.

Back in Seattle on 15 September, Emerald City Music will present the world premiere of JLA’s there is no one, not even the wind … Spring will meanwhile bring his latest major orchestral work, Become Desert, to be unveiled by Seattle Symphony.

More musical revelations at Lucerne Festival: thrilling Bartók Violin Concerto No. 2 featuring Patricia Kopatchinskaja in an unimprovable program of Bartók and Haydn by Mahler Chamber Orchestra led by the impeccable François-Xaver Roth.
The Haydn (Symphonies 22 and 96) was sleek and proto-Modernist in Roth’s interpretation, overflowing in invention and brought to life by the exquisitely fine-tuned playing of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

The Bartók Second — nicely complemented by the Dance Suite — spurred all Kopatchinskaja has to give: from her feistiest, most earth-rooted playing to star-drunk lyricism.

And then there was a post-concert treat in the “Interval,” from Kopatchinskaja plus her parents (dad Viktor on cimbalom and mom Emilia playing violin), with Venezuelan double-bassist Johane Gonzales: incisive Kúrtag and wonderful folk music arrangements.

Last night brought out still another side of Kopatchinskaja’s all-embracing artistry, in a Late Night concert with the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra led by Matthias Pintscher.

It’s clear that the Moldovan soloist regards Ligeti’s Violin Concerto as one of the ultimate masterpieces of the repertoire. Hearing her play it, you feel this is the only music in the world that matters, a world within world of where the concept of virtuosity itself is reimagined from the ground up.

Kopatchinskaja is the perfect violinist to advocate Ligeti’s wildly imaginative ideas, but also the formal ingenuity and, yes, melodic grace of this score. She also brought out the best from the incredibly gifted young Academy musicians. I can’t wait to hear the full ensemble shine in Monday’s all-Cerha concert.

The program also included fascinating performances of composer-in-residence Michel van der Aa’s Hysteresis for clarinet, ensemble, and tape, with Martin Adámek as the soloist and Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, with pianist Dimitri Vassilakis.

“Accentus Music is delivering the live video stream of the Lucerne Festival’s opening concert on Friday, August 11th, at 6:30 p.m. [CET]. The ceremonial act which is going to take place in the KKL Lucerne will be streamed simultaneously open-air at Lucerne’s Inseli Park as well as on Facebook Live. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra and its music director Riccardo Chailly will be performing three symphonic poems by Richard Strauss: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration as well as Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.

I finally had my first live experience of Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Teodor Currentzis, who brought his Perm-based musicAeterna to Lucerne’s Easter Festival last night for the first of two programs: early Mozart and Beethoven Eroica.

It very well might have been a new music evening: that’s how unexpected and full of discoveries the performance was. Currentzis has become something of a cult figure, and it’s easy to see why. A friend compared him visually to Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, with his spindly legs and tall, lanky figure. I wish I could have seen the expressions he was flashing, mirrored, I suspect, by his restlessly gesturing hands.

Currentzis seems to decide on the spur of the moment to fixate on a particular player or section, and then to stare them down, whip them up to further excitement, coax out a sudden swell or tamp it down to near inaudibility. No one knows when or where he’ll pounce: it’s all part of the electricity.

Mozart’s G minor Symphony K. 183 was full of shocks and epiphanies: the sort of thing we tend to privilege to the really big works like Eroica, but which are strewn about far and wide, and so unrecognized in so many other sources. I especially welcomed how Currentzis balances his spontaneous, red-hot, in-the-moment aura with carefully thought-through decisions (the articulation of the second theme reprise-time around, when it emanates a menacing despair; tempo differentiation of the Minuet and the Trio).

Patricia Kopatchinskaja is a revelation, nothing less. The playing in her bare feet, the poses she strikes, the comic interplay with Currentzis: the things people like to focus on are just a part of her entire, fascinatingly refreshing outlook, and it’s rooted in brilliant insights about the source of invention, say, in the Mozart D major Violin Concerto (K. 218) she played.

Actually, Kopatchinskaja didn’t just show up and “play” it, fulfill her contract, job done. It was such an unusual ratio of performance energy and creative expenditure to the Concerto’s part on the program.

It felt like an epic, and the audience seemed to learn far more than it had bargained for about what makes a concerto work, about how a soloist can interact with an ensemble of independent-minded players. Mozart’s folk song ploy in the finale became the key to Kopatchinskaja’s improvisational approach overall — the cadenzas she contributed wouldn’t have been out of place in Ligeti — and a bridge to her encores of Bartók and Enescu.

In their period-instrument Eroica, musicAeterna’s dangerous playing kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. I’ve never experienced in live performances of Beethoven’s Third such a powerful presence from the timpanist. The impact of the drums in the Funeral March was at devastating as in Mahler’s Sixth finale.

A couple of wind players almost lost the reins in the finale when one clarinetist got so worked up he knocked a stand over– at first it looked like there might be a domino effect, just before a big solo for the oboe (so much a protagonist in this symphony!). Aside from an emanation of angst-waves — like watching a tightrope walker regaining balance — the music pushed ahead, and was the more intense for it.

The third and final installment of Lucerne Festival’s 2016 programming is the Piano Festival. It starts on Saturday (19 November), with Grigory Sokolov in a Mozart-Schumann recital. And he’s playing one of the pianistic holy of holies, Schumann’s Op. 17.

The program for the 2017 Summer Festival in Lucerne has just been announced. The overall theme is “Identity.” Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Jay Campbell will be featured as “artistes étoiles,” and Michel van der Aa will be the composer-in-residence for 2017’s Summer Festival.

Lucerne has also launched a new magazine packed with interviews, commentary, and articles and listings of the programming for all three festivals.

This coming weekend brings the close of the Summer Festival in Lucerne. Along with the usual Stendhal Syndrome-inducing concentration of great artists and great art, the 2016 edition introduced two major changes — if not exactly paradigm shifts — to Lucerne Festival’s organization and overall character: the inauguration of Riccardo Chailly as new Music Director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, succeeding the late Claudio Abbado, and, in the wake of Pierre Boulez’s death, the first Lucerne Festival Academy under new leadership, with Wolgang Rihm as Artistic Director and Matthias Pintscher as Principal Conductor.

Michael Cooper reports in The New York Times on how the Lucerne Festival is “reinventing itself”:

But behind the scenes, the Lucerne Festival, an increasingly important part of the classical music ecosystem, was being forced to reinvent itself. Within the past couple of years, the festival has lost not one, but both of its guiding artistic lights: Mr. Abbado died in 2014 at 80, and Mr. Boulez this year at 90. Their losses pose a challenge at a moment when Europe’s leading summer festivals hotly compete for artists, audiences and prestige.

Cooper also wrote about the 2016 Lucerne Festival theme of women in music, interviewing four of the eleven female conductors who appeared on the podium there this summer: Barbara Hannigan, Marin Alsop, Susanne Mälkki, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.

And here’s a European perspective from one of the German-speaking world’s major music critics, Christian Wildhagen (who wrote his dissertation on Mahler 8, the work with which Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra opened the festival last month):

Last weekend at Lucerne Festival brought the world premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s latest major orchestral work: a percussion concerto titled Trurliade – Zone Zero (which references one of the Austrian composer’s sources of inspiration, the sci fi master Stanisław Lem). The soloist was Victor Hanna, and Matthias Pintscher conducted the Orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Academy.

Trurliadewas the eighth in the ongoing Roche Commissions series, which picks from the leading composers at work today to commission a new orchestral work every two years, which is then premiered at Lucerne Festival. Neuwirth has also been serving as this year’s composer-in-residence at the Festival, which is focusing on the theme of women in music.

Neuwirth is a genuinely fascinating, one-of-a-kind composer who has created especially striking works of music theater (including collaborations with fellow Austrian and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, an operatic treatment of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and a “musicstallation” in homage to Herman Melville, among others).

The composer has written an intriguing program note introducing her new concerto:

This is why the title of the piece refers to Stanisław Lem’s Trurl’s Machine. With his warning against unfreedom, Lem in turn alludes to George Orwell’s novel 1984. In Lem’s story the machine designed by Trurl insists on its mindless and inflexible assertion: “Two plus two is seven.” In Orwell’s book the apparatus of power demands obedience through re-education, propaganda lies, and surveillance by illogically claiming that “two plus two is five” – until the individual complies with the stipulations of the regime and gives up thinking. The regime “teaches” renegades and dissidents to love Big Brother by using cruel methods of torture. The protagonist, already demoralized and worn down mentally and physically through continual re-education measures, nevertheless does not give up the fight and becomes dangerous to the Party when he dares to express (mathematical) facts: “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four.” And he does so even though, according to Orwell, the loudspeakers keep demanding over and over again that everyone accept whatever Big Brother defines as true, including that two and two is five. This phrase represents the obedience required by an ideology in contrast to rational facts and truth.

Swiss Radio and Television has now posted the opening concert of Riccardo Chailly’s debut with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

Chailly opened the 2016 Summer Festival on 12 August with a rousing performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony: the one work missing from the late Claudio Abbado’s otherwise complete Mahler cycle with his beloved LFO.

The broadcast also includes a 10-minute portrait of the conductor with interviews by way of a prelude.

Christian Wildhagen, an expert on the Eighth (he wrote a dissertation about the work), covered Chailly’s interpretation for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

Black Panther broke records and crushed expectations at the box office it. Not just here in the States, but in foreign markets too. That performance, as well as the one by Get Out, can finally put to rest the notion that movies with black actors don't do well internationally.